Abstraction

When I stopped by the Florence Griswold Museum during a snowstorm in mid-March to see Peter Halley's retrospective, the glowing neon color and interlocking geometric forms had transformed the museum into a dazzling chamber of vibrating light.

By incorporating found objects and autobiographical artifacts like old photographs or rusted tools, Grasso is both evoking and evading narrative. Deracinated from function or context, familiar objects and his own identity are equally drafted into the abstract universe he is mapping.

Love, hate, pleasure, fascination. These are the shared conceptual territories explored in the stylistically disparate practices of painter Sandra Low and painter/sculptor Jaime Scholnick -- showing together for the first time at the Rio Hondo College Art Gallery in Cultural Gumbo.

Sam Erenberg's career in art has often brought him into contact with challenging materials and immutable forces. There are some kinds of art-making mediums, the mastery of which consists of giving up trying to master them.

A thread is a way of tracking an idea through different incarnations and across conversations; as a sewing tool, thread is something that stitches and holds together disparate parts, creating a new whole.

John has shown extensively in the US and abroad, and is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum, MOMA, and the New Museum, NY. He is currently included in Classless Society at the Tang Museum.

I like the term intervention when referring to my painting process. I just try to react off of things...marks on the painted surface, purposely warping a stretcher bar, cutting something then putting it back together. I want to create a scenario in which I have to fix something.

Shouldn't the most authoritative of our cultural institutions, certainly those renown globally, be so sensitive as to represent the history of international art with the like mindedness of diplomats to mitigating the injuries historically wrought by political and cultural colonizations?

Where other tributes were slight, uneven or unconventional, Urban Rhythms and Dreams of Paradise is the sort of show I had been waiting for: a considerable, fairly balanced and clear celebration of America's greatest collage artist.

"Art of Another Kind" has its holes -- and its obvious gender bias toward men (so maybe half of another O'Hara quote is true) -- but it succeeds in creating a more complex, widespread and dynamic picture of the groundbreaking period.